Sunday, November 09, 2014

Noticing

I took this quite a while back---in rain, in the Feather River Canyon---

near my son's home, one of the world's beautiful places.

Tonight, another thoughtful, and playful, poem by Mary Ruefle.
Alert: I have several more marked in her Selected Poems, to share here. Get this book!
I also have Madness, Rack and Honey; collected lectures, Wave Books, 2012, which I must read in smaller bites, because the thought is so rich and compressed. Both of these books, as well as the small one of her erasure poems, A Little White Shadow, have the most beautiful, soft, simple, off-white paper covers. Lovely to hold in the hand! The same publisher has issued Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior in a similar cover. Love it!

After a Rain

They noticed, you see, that I was a noticingkind of person, and so they left the dictionaryout in the rain and I noticed it,I noticed it was open to the rain page,much harm had come to it, it had aged to the ageof ninety-five paper years and I noticed rainbowfollows rain in the book, just as it does onearth, and I noticed it was silly of me tonotice so much but I noticed there is no stationaryin heaven, I noticed an infant will grip your hand likethere is no tomorrow, while the very agedwill give you a weightless hand for the same reason,I noticed in a loving frenzy that some are hemlockedand others are not (believe me yours unspeakably obliged),I noticed whoever I met in my search for entranceinto this world went too far (but that was theirdestination) and I noticed the road followed roughlythe route of a zipper around a closed case,I noticed the sea was human but no one believed me,and that some birds have the wingspan of an inchand some flowers the petal span of a foot yet the twoare very well suited to each other, I noticed that.There are eight major emotional states but I forgetseven of them, I can hear the ambulance singingbut I don’t think it will stop for me,because I noticed the space between the waterfall andthe rock and I am safe there, resting inthe cradle of all there is, the way a sea horse(when it is tired) will tie its tail to a seaweedand rest, and there has not been, in my opinion,enough astonishment over this fact, so now I willwithdraw my interest in the whole external worldwhile I am in the noticing mode, notice how Italk to you just as if you were sitting on my lapand not as if it were raining, not as if there werea sheet of water between us or anything else.

Mary Ruefle

Selected Poems, Wave Books, Seattle WA, 2010, pages 132-133.

And from September in Michigan, deer graze in light rain. See how it darkens their coats?